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Direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising boosts drug costs both by directly increasing expenses to drugmakers that they then incorporate into the price of the drug and by increasing consumer demand for medication they may not need.

Lack of patient health data access often leads to duplicate testing and unnecessary treatments, increasing costs for consumers, doctors, hospitals and health systems. Medicare continues to push forward on its efforts, but those efforts have so far, gone nowhere.

Under CMS's plan, the states could set minimum requirements, allowing insurers to scale back prescription drug coverage, for example, as long as it ramped up coverage in another category. That allows them to make plans less appealing to someone they don't want to cover, such as someone with long-term conditions like diabetes or arthritis – in other words, older folks.

Realistically, you can't reduce the costs of Medicare or Medicaid in big way unless you cut the costs of services or eliminate services altogether. So it's important to cut through the phony language when politicians lump Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid together in a fix-them-all-together solution. The policy solutions are different.

Since 2000, SS beneficiaries have lost roughly 30% of buying power...Rising prices affect seniors differently than the general population, as housing, medical costs and prescription drugs represent such a large part of their spending. And the miniscule COLA received for 2017 of .03% only exacerbated the problem.

By 2020, the donut hole is scheduled to close entirely and go away… though this could change. Assuming the donut hole does close, enrollees will pay 25% of the cost of drugs, up to the catastrophic coverage limit.

In arbitration, the parties hire a private judge and use a different set of rules that can be more restrictive than civil court. A 2009 study found that awards to plaintiffs can be as much as 35 percent lower, using arbitration.

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“Investigators should observe nursing home staff demonstrating their actual emergency plans rather than just checking that these plans would have been written down. If you have not implemented and exercised plans, they are paper tigers…"

The IG's report blamed Medicare for failing to enforce federal law which requires that nursing homes immediately notify the police in abuse cases.

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A 2011 New York state study found that as few as 1 in 24 cases of abuse against residents age 60 and older were reported to authorities...Because a visit to the emergency room may be the only time an older adult leaves the house, the staff of the ER can be the first line of defense.

The House Budget Committee's plan doesn't end with raising the eligibility ages and premium support. It goes further, making a series of "modernization" ideas, including a cap on hospitalization out-of-pocket costs, streamlined deductible structure and limits on the richest Medigap supplemental plans. It would also expand means testing of Part B (outpatient services) and Part D (prescription drugs) premiums for high-income seniors.